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Neologisms and Non-Shakespearean Words in A Lover’s Complaint

Scholars arguing against Shakespeare’s authorship of a particular piece of writing sometimes advance as evidence its use of several “non-Shakespearean” words, by which they mean words that do not appear within Shakespeare’s undisputed works. For example, in 1954 Warren D. Smith put forward the theory that the choruses in Henry V were not by Shakespeare, but had been interpolated into the First Folio text by somebody else. He buttressed his case with the claim that the choruses contain 28 words “which appear nowhere else in Shakespeare”; he also saw significance in the fact “that two or three words seem to be employed by the choruses in senses other than Shakespeare gives them elsewhere”.

Smith convinced no one. But Brian Vickers employs both these kinds of argument in denying Shakespeare A Lover’s Complaint, which was published with Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Thomas Thorpe’s famous quarto of 1609. Vickers believes that the poem should be reassigned to John Davies of Hereford. Much earlier, J. W. Mackail had enlisted the evidence of “non-Shakespearean” words in formulating his case for denying the authenticity of A Lover’s Complaint. Whether the poem is by Shakespeare is an important question. Some critics have considered it an essential element in a sequence structured by the author. If it is spurious, this view must be mistaken, and the order in which the sonnets themselves appear may well lack authorial sanction. Mackail wrote decades before Alfred Hart published his painstaking investigations into Shakespeare’s vocabulary. Hart counted the number of different words in every Shakespeare play and in the poems and produced tables showing how Shakespeare’s total vocabulary increased with each new work. For each work he gave tallies for words that were peculiar to it, that it shared with one other Shakespeare work, with two others, with three others, and so on. He also provided, for a small selection of plays, counts of “new” words, meaning words for which a Shakespeare play or poem was the source of OED’s first citation, though he recognized that several of these words may have been in circulation beforehand and used the term “new” simply “for the sake of brevity”. He added remarks about the frequency and nature of Shakespeare’s “new” words.

Hart spelled out in some detail his working definition of a “word”. He was concerned not with mere graphic units, as identifiable by computers, but with parts of speech and with meanings. His “method of enumeration was, in the main, based on the principles adopted by the editors of The Oxford English Dictionary”. For his purposes, a word was, with minor exceptions that were carefully explained, an OED headword. Thus identical graphic units with completely distinct senses or functions were distinguished, but different inflexions of the same verb came under a single heading, and whether a noun was singular or plural was immaterial. Hart compiled his counts from Alexander Schmidt’s excellent Shakespeare Lexicon, but corrected a few obvious errors and misunderstandings.

Seiten 288 - 302

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37307/j.1866-5381.2008.02.06
Lizenz: ESV-Lizenz
ISSN: 1866-5381
Ausgabe / Jahr: 2 / 2008
Veröffentlicht: 2008-12-15
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Dokument Neologisms and Non-Shakespearean Words in A Lover’s Complaint